Smoking bans, or how to make liberals go completely nonlinear in one easy lesson
A few years ago, before we spawned, the best used to play a lot of Scrabble®™©. One of the clubs she played in a lot met on the eastside, in a terrifically smoky bar along MLK Ave. It wasn't much fun to either play scrabble in or to wait for her to finish up so we could catch the bus home, because it was completely full of smoke, in the sort of classic your clothes will reek of smoke for a week sense that, thankfully, isn't that common any more. We were both delighted when a new bar opened across the street and offered the club a new venue to play in. It was smoky, but nowhere nearly as horrid as the old venue, despite having pretentions to being a "english-style" bar.
A few years passed, and then the local ubergovernment floated a proposal to ban smoking in bars, officially because of the risk of second-hand smoke (I suspect that unofficially it's because cigarette smoke is nasty and the trickle of letters to the public health officials about it had swelled into a raging torrent.) The reaction in this bar was pretty much as if Diane Linn had walked in with a hornet's nest, set it down, then kicked it across the floor. Almost instantaneously everyone working at the bar started wearing "smoking bans are icky" buttons, pro-smoking fliers started being tacked to almost every vertical surface, and the (tiny, but hysterical) smoking contingent cranked their smoking habits up to rival the smoke and ash output of Mt. St. Helens, while, of course, bitterly whining about the Evil! State! Infringing! On! Their! Rights! (This is a bar in Portland, Oregon, mind you; prior to the proposed smoking ban, there were nothing but liberals on that particular bus. From the vitreolic quality of their whining, I would not be at all surprised if they all switched over to the Evil Party in time for the 2004 "election")
I don't know how this worked out for them in the long run. The quality of their food plunged downhill around this point (a sensible business decision; if you're going to sell food to people who can't even taste it, it's somewhat pointless to waste money and time preparing good food) and that, combined with the blue wall of death that we used to experience at the other bar (which had, by then, gone out of business), was more than enough for me. The best kept playing scrabble at that club for a while, and eventually gave up when she got tired of coming back with her clothes and hair reeking of cigarette/cigar/pipe smoke (the scrabble club played in the "smoke-free" part of the bar, which, um, was about as smoke-free as the "smoke-free" seats in airliners used to be before the airlines started banning smoking altogether.)
And the smoking ban? It never happened.
The reason I'm remembering this is that the city of Austin, Texas (deep in the heart of Jesusland, which proves something, but I'm not sure exactly what) has just (barely) passed a law prohibiting smoking in bars, and, as you can probably guess if you read some of the A-list left weblogs, it's yet another case of kicking the hornets nest. And I'd not be at all surprised if it ended up with some of the smokers switching over to the Evil Party; the debate (if I'm not mistaken, the "if the staff doesn't want to get lung cancer, they can work somewhere else" argument has already reared it's head. And that's by no means the most outrageous argument) has already reached the sort of spittle-flecked rage that you don't see outside of a GOA membership meeting, so the mass burning of Democratic Party membership cards and ceremonial linking to the racist right-wing weblogs may not be too far behind.
Personally, if I was in the smoker's shoes, I'd just tone down the rhetoric, wait a while, and see what happens. Being able to say "ha, ha, I told you so!" has a long and honored history, and if you can show off the collatoral damage to the local tax rolls and tourism industry, rolling back the repressive effects of public health laws becomes a lot easier.
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Actually, even though cigarette smoke makes me wheeze and I was getting tired of laundering my jacket every time I went, I would have gladly kept going for the Scrabble. (Though I quit staying for a snack afterwards; as you note, the smoke plus the declining food quality made it not worth it any more.)
No, the problem was that somehow escaping for hours on Thursday night got to be way too difficult to manage once we had two kids. Especially when the kids don't fall asleep for at least an hour after I get home.
Sniff. I miss that obsession.